The Living Building Challenge Collaborative: Italy wishes you a relaxing break in August at seaside, mountain, lake, cities of art and journeys, more or less distant, proposing a list of “must read” summer readings to inspire you while searching for a regenerative sustainability . Have great vacations! (in brackets: who suggests the book 🙂

The Living Building Challenge Collaborative: Italy (LBCC Italy) is a group of local professional volunteers committed to sustainability, education and implementation of the Living Building Challenge. The LBCC Italy provides a unique in person forum to facilitate change in the built environment. LBC is the most progressive sustainability standard in the world. The number of teams trying to achieve Living Building Challenge status increase every year.

An exploration in progressing a paradigm shift in built environment thinking, from sustainability to restorative sustainability and on to regenerative sustainability.

Do you want to explore the new frontiers of sustainability? From the work of the COST Action CA16114 RESTORE: REthinking Sustainability TOwards a Regenerative Economy, Working Group 1. Restorative Sustainability, here is our first booklet (downloadable for free). Enjoy 🙂

This publication, with contributions from over 20 EU countries is an exploration in progressing a paradigm shift in built environment thinking, from sustainability to restorative sustainability and on to regenerative sustainability.

It presents a reference document for future work of the RESTORE Action, for other Cost Actions and for built environment academia and industry organisations.

VanDusen Botanical Garden, Vancouver (CAN)

Summary

Introduction

Definitions – the Language for Sustainability

Social, Health and Participation in Sustainability

Living Buildings

Regenerative Heritage

Circular Economy

WG1 Activities

Epilogue

WG1 People

Portland Japanese Garden, Portland (OR, USA)

(From the Introduction by Martin Brown and Edeltraud Haselsteiner)

It is now some 30 years since Brundtland defined sustainable development, broadly defined as not doing anything today to compromise tomorrow’s generation, and in doing so defined sustainability for business and enterprises globally.
Many in the built environment have taken this passive ‘do nothing’ approach, as license to do the least possible. Consequently, we have and we continue to compromise future generations.
The built environment is a huge influencer on ‘sustainability’, we spend over 90% of our time working, living and playing within our buildings. Despite sustainability and corporate social responsibility initiatives it is irresponsible that we have generally failed to grasp our influence and to address the potential to move the needle on wider global sustainability and climate issues.
Buildings, and the manner in which we design, construct and maintain them have been a significant contributor to climate breakdown we are witnessing.

Restorative and regenerative approaches can flip this enabling buildings to become part of climate regeneration solutions.
Maybe sustainability is not a journey, but a state of equilibrium, based on giving as much as we take. On the negative side where we take more, we are unsustainable and no matter how much we reduce our impacts we will always remain unsustainable. On the positive side ‘to do more good‘ we open doors to
restore environments and communities, and to create and enable conditions for environmental, social and economic regenerative growth […].

The Red Queen is a fictional character in Lewis Carroll‘s fantasy novel, Through the Looking-Glass. She is often confused with the Queen of Hearts from the previous book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, although the two are very different. The two share the characteristics of being strict queens associated with the color red. However, their personalities are very different. Indeed, Carroll, in his lifetime, made the distinction between the two Queens by saying: “I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion – a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm – she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses!”

Yann Arthus-Bertrand, born in 1946, has always had a passion for the animal world and the natural environment. When he was 30, he travelled to Kenya with his wife with whom he carried out a three-year study on the behaviour of a family of lions in the Massaï Mara reserve. While in Africa, he earned his living as a hot-air balloon pilot. This was when he really discovered the earth from above and the advantages of viewing what he was studying from afar to gain an overall picture of an area and its resources.

Little by little, Yann became a reporter focusing on environmental issues, and collaborating with Géo, National Geographic, Life, Paris Match, Figaro Magazine etc. In 1991, he founded the first aerial photography agency in the world.

For the First Rio Conference in 1992, Yann decided to prepare a big work for the year 2000 on the state of the planet: The Earth From the Air. This book encountered a great success and over 3 million copies were sold. The outdoor exhibitions have been seen so far by about 200 Million people. Yann then created the Goodplanet Foundation that aims to raise public awareness of environmental issues, implement carbon offset programmes and fight deforestation with local NGOs.

Within the Foundation, he developed the 6 billion Others project, that has just changed names and become 7 billion Others. More than 6000 interviews were filmed in 84 countries. From a Brazilian fisherman to a Chinese shopkeeper, from a German performer to an Afghan farmer, all answered the same questions about their fears, dreams, ordeals, hopes: “What have you learned from your parents? What do you want to pass on to your children? What difficult circumstances have you been through? What does love mean to you?” Forty or so questions that help us to find out what separates and what unites us.

In 2006, Yann started the series Vu Du Ciel, a television documentary series of several one-and-a-half hour episodes, each dealing with a particular environmental problem. Encouraged by his television experiment, Yann Arthus-Bertrand undertook the production of a full-length feature film, HOME, that deals with the state of our planet. The film was released on 2009 on television, on the Internet, on DVD and in cinemas simultaneously worldwide, almost entirely free of charge to the public. More than 600 million people have seen it so far.

In 2011, Yann directed two films for the United Nations : the film Forest, official film of the 2011 International Year of the Forest, and the film Desertification. For Rio + 20, Yann directed the film “Planet Ocean” with Michael Pitiot. This film aims to promote understanding of the importance of oceans in the ecosystem. In the same time, the GoodPlanet Foundation initiated a “Ocean Programme”, to raise awareness of the importance of marine ecosystems.

HOME (2009) – the movie

In 2012, Yann began filming his next feature film called “Human“. At the crossroads of “Home” and the project “7 Billion Others”, “Human” is comprised of interviews with people from all conditions in over 45 countries, and aerial images gleaned all over the world. Filming takes place in very diverse landscapes since June 2012. Particular, from January 2014, Thailand, Antarctica, Dubai, Brazil, Pakistan, Cuba or Japan. The film is now available.

In July 2013, Yann Arthus-Bertrand opened his photographic studio in Paris. This friendly place, open to all, is to allow everyone to discover his way of working, to better understand what happens behind each of his photos and meet his team.

The work of Yann Arthus-Bertrand has shown its commitment to awaken a collective responsibility and conscience. In this awareness “campaign” the objective is to reach to the most people possible. All the films produced by HOPE are available free of charge to NGOs, nonprofits and schools in the frame work of environmental education [from Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s web site].

1168 pages of mystery, science fiction, suspense, romance, erotism, capitalism or better to say industrialism. A great effort for me, to be frank (it is one of the longest novels ever written), but it was worth it. Atlas Shrugged (1957) is Ayn Rand‘s fourth and last novel, it was also her longest, and the one she considered to be her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing.

Atlas Shrugged is as relevant and stimulating to an active-minded person today as on the day it was written. The reason is not hard to identify. In Atlas Shrugged Rand is concerned with timeless, fundamental issues of human existence. The book explores a number of philosophical themes from which Rand would subsequently develop Objectivism. In doing so, it expresses the advocacy of reason, individualism, capitalism, and the failures of governmental coercion [Wikipedia].

“My personal life,” says Ayn Rand, “is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence: ‘And I mean it.’ I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books— and it has worked for me, as it works for my characters. The concretes differ, the abstractions are the same. Ayn Rand wrote volumes urging people to be selfish.

What? Aren’t people already too selfish? Just do whatever you feel like, be a thoughtless jerk, and exploit people to get ahead. Easy, right? Except that acting thoughtlessly and victimizing others, Rand claims, is not in your self-interest. What Rand advocates is an approach to life that’s unlike anything you’ve ever heard before. Selfishness, in her philosophy, means:

Follow reason, not whims or faith.

Work hard to achieve a life of purpose and productiveness.

Earn genuine self-esteem.

Pursue your own happiness as your highest moral aim.

Prosper by treating others as individuals, trading value for value.

At the dawn of our lives, writes Rand, we “seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.” Rand’s philosophy is that vision. Objectivism, a philosophy for living on earth.

METAPHYSICS: REALITY“Wishing won’t make it so”

Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, begins by embracing the basic fact that existence exists. Reality is, and in the quest to live we must discover reality’s nature and learn to act successfully in it.
To exist is to be something, to possess a specific identity. This is the Law of Identity: A is A.Facts are facts, independent of any consciousness. No amount of passionate wishing, desperate longing or hopeful pleading can alter the facts. Nor will ignoring or evading the facts erase them: the facts remain, immutable.
In Rand’s philosophy, reality is not to be rewritten or escaped, but, solemnly and proudly, faced. One of her favorite sayings is Francis Bacon’s: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
Reality — that which exists — has no alternatives, no competitors, nothing “transcending” it. To embrace existence is to reject all notions of the supernatural and the mystical, including God.

ESPISTEMOLOGY: REASON“You can’t eat your cake and have it, too”

The essential advice of Rand’s philosophy is: embrace reason as an absolute. This means: choose to face the facts at all times, in all areas, whether at work or at home, in business or in love — and no matter what conclusion logically ensues, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
The purpose of epistemology is to help teach us how to reason: how to think conceptually, how to properly define our terms, how to form and apply principles.
Reason doesn’t work automatically. We have to choose to activate our minds, to set them in motion, to direct them to the task of understanding the facts, and to actively perform the steps that such understanding requires. Our basic choice in life is “to think or not.”
To choose to follow reason, Rand argues, is to reject emotions, faith or any form of authoritarianism as guides in life.

Atlas (Lee Lawrie), Rockefeller Center, NYC (17 Nov 2013)

ETHICS: SELF INTEREST“Man is an end in himself”

Why does man need morality?
The typical answer is that we must learn to deny our own interests and happiness in order to serve God or other people — and morality will teach us to do this.
Rand’s answer is radically different. The purpose of morality, she argues, is to teach us what is in our self-interest, what produces happiness.
“Man has,” she observes, “no automatic code of survival. . . . His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires.”
This is what the science of ethics studies — and what Objectivism offers. “Man must choose his actions, values and goals,” she summarizes, “by the standard of that which is proper to man — in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.”

POLITICS: CAPITALISM“Give me liberty or give me death!”

The ideal social system, Rand holds, is laissez-faire capitalism. Economically, this means not today’s mixture of freedom and government controls but “a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”
Rand’s advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism is a consequence of her deeper philosophical views. An individual who eagerly faces reality, who embraces his own rational mind as an absolute, and who makes his own life his highest moral purpose will demand his freedom. He will demand the freedom to think and speak, to earn property and associate and trade, and to pursue his own happiness.
Laissez-faire capitalism, Rand argues, is the system of individual rights. In such a system the government has only one function, albeit a vital one: to protect the rights of each individual by placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control. [from AynRand.org]

If you want to know more about:

AynRand.org by Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), the source for information on the life, writings and work of Ayn Rand, headquartered in Irvine, California, with a second office in Alexandria, Virginia.Ayn Rand Facebook page (433k followers)
Ayn Rand on Twitter: @AynRandInstAyn Rand Institute on YouTubeAtlas Shrugged teacher’s guide

Carlo M. Cipolla (August 15, 1922 – September 5, 2000) was an Italian economic historian. Cipolla produced two tongue-in-cheek essays on economics, published in 1988 (in Italian) under the title “Allegro ma non troppo” (“Happy but not too much”). The second essay, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, explores the controversial subject of stupidity. Stupid people are seen as a group, more powerful by far than major organizations such as the Mafia and the industrial complex, which without regulations, leaders or manifesto nonetheless manages to operate to great effect and with incredible coordination. Cipolla identifies two factors to consider when exploring human behaviour: benefits and losses that an individual causes to him or herself; benefits and losses that an individual causes to others.

By creating a graph with the first factor on the x-axis and the second on the y-axis, we obtain 4+1 groups of people: 1. Intelligent people (top right), who contribute to society and who leverage their contributions into reciprocal benefits; 2. Naive people (top left), who contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it, 3. Bandits (bottom right), who pursue their own self-interest even when doing so poses a net detriment to societal welfare, 4. Stupid people (bottom left), whose efforts are counterproductive to both their and others’ interests, 5. Helpless/ineffectual people (center).

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